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A Chinese researcher who attempted to smuggle a crop-infecting fungus into the United States by hiding biological samples inside a book pleaded guilty in Michigan but will serve no further jail time beyond the five months already spent in custody. Yunqing Jian, 33, a former temporary researcher at the University of Michigan, admitted that she had asked a colleague in China to secretly mail samples of Fusarium graminearum- a fungus capable of devastating wheat, barley, maize and rice- to her US lab in 2024. The package was intercepted by federal agents.

The fungus was at the centre of a wider scheme prosecutors say Yunqing Jian carried out with her boyfriend Zunyong Liu who was separately caught at a Detroit airport carrying small samples of the same pathogen.

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